The shocker is not the medicine but the age which a doctors' group singled out on Monday. The American Pediatrics Association recommended that children as young as 8 be given the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins in order to ward off future heart disease which begins at an early age. They had said age 10 and then only if a child hadn't lost weight.

One cannot blame the doctors. They're only trying to prevent future misery as obese children become obese adults with coronary heart disease, who become either people who drop dead of heart attacks before middle age or people who have to undergo expensive bypass surgery with long recuperation times and a lifetime of consequences. They also say few children would meet the criteria for receiving the drug.

The risk is real. A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine said that being overweight in childhood now will increase the number of people who are obese to about or slightly more than one-third of the population by 2020, and that will lead to more cases of coronary heart disease and more early deaths, not to mention astronomical health care bills as the system deals with people who develop problems at earlier ages and who have complications much longer through their lives.

There is also no solid evidence what these drugs will do to bodies. Although several statins have been used in children during the last decades, and although their use is expanding, patients have been followed at most for only a few years. Physicians say the drugs are safe, yet that is not very long for young bodies to show problems.

Beyond the risks of giving any drug is the very real possibility that what has happened to children on mood drugs will happen with the statins. Gradually the use of statins may grow as people seek a way to avoid the much more difficult chore of changing habits and lifestyles, and as pharmaceutical marketing efforts play on fears. (Stop worrying about your child's future. Give him Baby Statin.)

There are people who really need these drugs, people whose genetics put them at great risk of having cholesterol levels which are too high. We don't want to curtail physicians' judgment on when these drugs should be used. But if the vision of pre-teens on cholesterol drugs shocks you, please, please unplug the video game console and the television, and send your children outside to run around. Better still, go out and run with them. You'll all feel better.